Race to Witch Mountain

Year 11, Day 276 - 10/3/19 - Movie #3,374

BEFORE: This will finish off the Dwayne Johnson chain, as he carries over from "Doom" - a very respectable showing with 8 films, and I didn't even get to many of his films.  Still avoiding the "Fast & Furious" franchise.  He's been trending on Twitter this week, but apparently I had nothing to do with that, he's going to appear on the new WWE Smackdown show on Fox tomorrow.  What great timing!

THE PLOT: A Las Vegas cabbie enlists the help of a UFO expert to protect two siblings with paranormal powers from the clutches of a government organization that wants to use the kids for their plans.

AFTER: First off, there are no witches in this film, it turns out.  Witch Mountain is a fictional place where there's a government facility, much like Area 51 (which we're told doesn't really exist, but come on...).  But that suggests we're talking about aliens here, two people who look like normal teens but have some extraordinary powers.  There were two films back in the 1970's that this is roughly based on, "Escape to Witch Mountain" and "Return from Witch Mountain", and I do sort of remember them, but only vaguely.  They had a lot of campy 1970's stars like Eddie Albert, Bette Davis and Denver Pyle in them, but still, that makes this some kind of sequel or reboot, rather than a direct remake.

Like "Doom" and "The Rundown", this one was made when The Rock was famous, but not quite a superstar yet.  He plays a Vegas cab driver here, and like his character in "The Rundown", he owes some big important (but probably criminal) person a lot of money, and he's in the midst of working off that debt.  The last thing he really needs is a couple of alien kids hiring him to drive out to the middle of nowhere, but of course that's what ends up happening.  Confusion follows when he assumes that the shadowy government people chasing the kids are instead shadowy mobsters chasing him.

Then there's also a mysterious (robot?) killer who keeps turning up also.  Really, that's just an excuse to have a character that The Rock can use his wrestling moves on.  In case you didn't notice, in many of his films, Johnson comes pretty close to giving bad guys something like the Rock Bottom or the People's Elbow.  It's almost like directors kept asking him to do the stuff he's good at, the stuff that made him famous in the first place.  The rest of the film, apart from the fight scenes, is pretty blah though.  I wish they'd made more out of treating the aliens like "illegal aliens", that's a great metaphor - but then, this was released back in 2009, before our government started its wave after wave of anti-immigrant hysteria.

Throughout the film, there's (quite coincidentally and conveniently) some sort of UFO convention going on at one of the Vegas casinos.  But we also regularly see people dressed up in sci-fi costumes, most notably a pair of guys dressed as stormtroopers from "Star Wars", but also there are people dressed like characters from "Tron" (hey, all Disney films or future Disney films, another coincidence...).  Now, it would be theoretically possible for the same casino/hotel to be hosting a UFO convention and a comic-con (where people would dress up like Star Wars characters) at the same time.  But isn't it WAY more likely that some screenwriter just didn't know the difference, and thought mistakenly that for some reason, it would be appropriate to cosplay at a UFO convention?

But it's extremely appropriate that there are costumed sci-fi characters seen attending a convention, because the New York Comic-Con starts today - so I'll be working there the next two days, and I'll be back here with another film on Sunday.  This was always planned as a possible spot for a break, but I had no way of knowing there would be a Comic-Con (or sci-fi con) seen in this film!  Also, I didn't know this was set in and around Las Vegas, and I'll be going there myself in just over two weeks!  But first I have to survive the NY Comic-Con, which isn't easy for me - in fact, it gets a little harder for me each time I work at a convention.  That's why I'm only going there two days and not the full four days, I'm counting on my co-workers to cover the first and last days, and handle the load-out afterwards, which is one of the toughest parts for me.  Sometimes I'm the ONLY one who works the load-out, last time I had to convince my brother-in-law to help me, and buy him dinner after.  This time I'm trying to take it a little easier, and if my boss has to do the load-out, maybe he'll realize how hard I've been working at it these last few years.  Probably not.

Also starring Carla Gugino (last seen in "San Andreas"), AnnaSophia Robb (last seen in "The Way Way Back"), Alexander Ludwig (last seen in "The Hunger Games"), Ciaran Hinds (last seen in "First Man"), Tom Everett Scott (last seen in "One True Thing"), Tom Woodruff Jr. (last seen in "Sorry to Bother You"), Garry Marshall (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Cheech Marin (last heard in "Cars 3"), Chris Marquette (last seen in "Alpha Dog"),  Billy Brown (last seen in Cloverfield"), Eva Huang, Kim Richards (last seen in Black Snake Moan"), Ike Eisenmann, Bob Clendenin (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Kevin Christy, Sam Wolfson, Bryan Fogel (last seen in "Icarus"), with cameos from Whitley Streiber, William J. Birnes, Meredith Salenger (last heard in Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens) and archive footage of Ronald Reagan (last seen in "Billionaire Boys Club"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle").

RATING: 5 out of 10 conspiracy theorists

Doom

Year 11, Day 275 - 10/2/19 - Movie #3,373

BEFORE: 7 films in a row is a LOT for any actor - and in any other year, maybe Dwayne Johnson (carrying over from "Rampage") would have a shot at being the person with the most screen appearances this year.  But this is not a normal year - doing a month of documentaries means that he will be topped by several U.S. Presidents, including Barack Obama and Richard Nixon.  Still, his 8 films (counting tomorrow's) will probably put him up near the top of the list, somewhere near James Franco.

THE PLOT: Space Marines are sent to investigate strange events at a research facility on Mars but find themselves at the mercy of genetically enhanced killing machines.

AFTER: Because "Rampage" and "Doom" are both based on video games, get it?  But one's an arcade game from the 80's and one's a more recent first-person shooter, I know.  Look, this one was never going to be Shakespeare, I just want to take this one for whatever it's worth and move on, OK?

This one's a lot like "The Thing", or maybe those tense parts of "Alien" with a group of people in an enclosed space being stalked by a killer creature, or maybe creatures, only it's set on Mars rather than in Antarctica or on a spaceship.  And conveniently there's a process by which people get from Earth to Mars and back super-quick, and that's got something to do with an ancient civilization that apparently lived on one planet and had a summer home on the other.  And the people of that civilization had an extra chromosome, which is important somehow - look, the science here is junk, it just doesn't matter.  It's just a set-up to get a bunch of people into these dark corridors where they can shoot up a bunch of monsters before getting eaten by other monsters.  Right?

This bunch of Interplanetary Marines, aka "Space Force", is sent on a rescue mission to the lab on Mars, where scientists and archaeologists have been working on experiments that will totally benefit mankind, and in NO WAY end up turning them into flesh-eating zombies.  And one of the Marines just happens to be the brother of one of the female scientists, and they're sort of estranged, because of something that happened to their parents years ago on Mars that couldn't possibly be related to the creatures that are plaguing the lab at the current moment.

There's a sequence 2/3 of the way through that totally replicates the P.O.V. style of the video-game, but I think it's totally warranted by the script.  Still, they managed to incorporate all of the excitement of the videogame, with exactly none of the interactivity.  We're still WATCHING stuff happen to other people instead of feeling like it's happening to us, and that our actions are making a difference.

Years later, somebody made a sequel to this film, starring none of the same actors, and it was apparently released this week, it's called "Doom: Annihilation", and it seems like it's received zero publicity, I wasn't even aware of it until today.  Yeah, that's not a good sign either.

Honestly, I fell asleep about an hour into this film, and I had to force myself awake (and take my last hit of Mountain Dew) in order to be able to finish.  That's a bad sign for an action movie.  As a result I was then wide awake at 5 am, could not get to sleep until about 7 am.  This does not bode well for later this week, when I'll have to get up at 7:30 to leave the house at 8 to be at my office at 9 and Comic-Con before 10.  Somehow I've got to figure out how to get myself on a more regular sleeping schedule before Thursday night.

Also starring Karl Urban (last seen in "Pete's Dragon"), Rosamund Pike (last seen in "Hostiles"), Razaaq Adoti, Richard Brake (last seen in "The Sisters Brothers"), Dexter Fletcher (last heard in "Sherlock Gnomes"), Al Weaver (last seen in "Me and Orson Welles"), Ben Daniels (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), DeObia Oparei, Yao Chin, Robert Russell, Brian Steele, Doug Jones (last seen in "Crimson Peak").

RATING: 4 out of 10 proximity mines

Rampage

Year 11, Day 274 - 10/1/19 - Movie #3,372

BEFORE: OK, here's how October's going to play out, ideally.  I've got 20 films set up, which works out great because once I take 2 days off to work at NY Comic-Con, and 8 days off for a vacation, that leaves me with just 21 days.  Jeez, it's almost like I'm getting good at planning this stuff.  However, this October's going to be a little different, because I'm working on a Perfect Year for linking, and I wasn't able to come up with a 20-film chain that's completely horror-based.  There was a HUGE gap between two smaller chains, and the only way I could find to bridge that gap was to dip into the realm of animation, which actually seems fine because two of the animated films on my list were sort of Halloween-based anyway, but for kids, obviously.  But I had to also include a couple straight, not-horror-at-all animated films just to link back to the horror theme, and also I needed to drop in one film about golf.  Go figure.

So all those classic Mummy-based films I recorded off TCM, well, they're going to have to wait.  Other random one-off horror films that don't connect to anything else, like "Swamp Thing" and "Salem's Lot", they're going to have to wait, too.  I'm not throwing away my shot at a Perfect Year just to clear some deadwood off the list.  If next year is all random horror films, so be it, but this chain is going to link from New Year's to Christmas, even if I have to go off-topic.  So here come 20 films that are MOSTLY horror, only there are 4 films that may not belong here.  BUT, since I watched films like "A Quiet Place" and "Alien: Covenant" this year outside of October (plus a slasher film spoof, "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil", and a couple films about serial killers..), maybe everything can balance out somehow at the year end wrap-up.

Dwayne Johnson carries over from "San Andreas", and so do three other actors.

THE PLOT: When three different animals become infected with a dangerous pathogen, a primatologist and a geneticist team up to stop them from destroying Chicago.

AFTER: Some of you out there may recognize the source material on this one - a giant ape makes his way to the big city, climbs up on top of a skyscraper and starts destroying aircraft.  Sound familiar?  Of course, I'm talking about the famous arcade game from the 1980's, also called "Rampage".  Why, what were YOU thinking about?  And no, it's not the one where Mario has to climb up the ladders and dodge barrels, that's "Donkey Kong" - which was supposed to be called "Monkey Kong", I don't care how they try to spin it after the fact, let's just all agree that one of the most famous games ever got its name because of a typographical error made by a Japanese person, OK?  "Monkey Kong" is a stupid name, but "Donkey Kong" is accidentally brilliant.

"Rampage" was a game where you played as one of three monsters, climbed up the sides of buildings in a city-scape and started smashing windows in the building until it collapsed.  Then you had to jump off the building before it fell, or your character would take damage.  It was totally an original idea, not based on any movie whatsoever, unless you count "King Kong", "Godzilla" and every werewolf film ever made.  But it scratched that little itch I mentioned yesterday, the little part inside us that wants to see skyscrapers fall down, provided we're not inside them, or standing underneath.  If you're keeping score, that's THREE films with Dwayne Johnson THIS WEEK where buildings getting knocked down or catching on fire is central to the plot.  See what I mean about that being a trend?

But this is the first film during my "Rock Around the Clock" week of programming where they teamed him up with somebody BIGGER than himself.  I mean, he shares a good deal of screen time with Naomie Harris, and she's fairly short (I think contractually his screen romances or comedy partners can't be taller than 5 1/2 feet tall.)  Dwayne Johnson is 6 feet and 5 inches tall, but everybody ends up looking small standing next to a giant gorilla.  And if you didn't buy him as a chef or a lifeguard, how about as a primate specialist at the San Diego "Wildlife Sanctuary"?  Of course, he's got special skills, could be ex-military as he apparently remembers how to fly a helicopter, but mostly his character deals with apes, especially George, a large silverback that can speak in sign language.

The big corporate bad here is the Energyne Corporation, which has been carrying on secret genetic manipulation experiments in space, and once they've used CRISPR to crack the code and accidentally create a mutated Rodent of Unusual Size that's fond of eating the human space station crew, the lone crew member tries to eject with the mutating pathogen, only her pod breaks up during re-entry and the segments with the pathogen land in three spots across the country.  You'd think that the space debris would burn up during re-entry, or perhaps all land in the same spot, but you'd be greatly mistaken there.  The plot dictates that the pieces with the mutating agent need to land right in the middle of the San Diego Zoo's gorilla cage, and in two other specific places to create the monsters needed for the film to match the video game.

Now, in the video-game, I remember that when the monsters took too much damage, they turned into tiny humans - so they must have started as people before mutating into monsters, right?  Only here in the film, it's animals that get turned into mutated animals.  Even though this isn't true to the game, I feel that I have to allow this, because it's a quicker and (slightly) more logical way of getting to the same place.  Look, this has been a very weird year already for movies, there's no question about that, and things are liable to get super-ultra-weird during October.  Sometimes a film goes so far in a crazy direction that it kind of becomes impossible to criticize, and I think that's what we're dealing with here. Completely impossible, bonkers stuff, so what am I going to do, sit here and just say, "None of this could really happen!"  Of course not, but as long we're playing around in a wild sandbox, let's not just get partially crazy, we might as well go full-on crazy nuts.

As long as we're playing around in the gene pool, why not give wild animals the growth rate of a blue whale, the speed of a cheetah, and the regenerative abilities of an African mouse, all while ramping up their aggressive tendencies.  What could POSSIBLY go wrong in this scenario?  But as long as I'm searching desperately for a NITPICK POINT, how come the exposure to the mutagen just turns George into a larger, more aggressive gorilla, when exposure to the same drug somehow gives the giant wolf the ability to shoot quills from its tail and wing-flaps to let it glide like a flying squirrel?

See, I wish I could just turn off my mind, relax and float downstream, but I just can't.  Still, I think I came close today, and that's saying something.  So far I've learned that the Rock hates bullies, loves animals and always tries to rescue people in need (unless his own daughter is in trouble...) plus if he gives you two options over how things are going to go down, always take option "A", it will just be easier for you in the long run.

Two more Dwayne Johnson films to go, then I'm breaking for NY Comic-Con.

Also starring Naomie Harris (last heard in "Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle"), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (last seen in "P.S. I Love You"), Malin Akerman (last seen in "27 Dresses"), Jake Lacy (last seen in "Carol"), Joe Manganiello (last seen in "Pee-Wee's Big Holiday"), P.J. Byrne (last seen in "The Clapper"), Marley Shelton (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Demetrius Grosse (last seen in "13 Hours"), Jack Quaid (last heard in "Smallfoot"), Breanne Hill (also carrying over from "San Andreas"), Matt Gerald (ditto), Will Yun Lee (ditto), Jason Liles,

RATING: 6 out of 10 stealth bombers (why?)

San Andreas

Year 11, Day 273 - 9/30/19 - Movie #3,371

BEFORE: Last day of September, with Dwayne Johnson carrying over again from "Baywatch".  Under 30 films left in the year, everything's still on track, and I fixed my method of burning to DVD, so everything's full steam ahead, until I have to stop for Comic-Con, and then vacation, and then a big break in November/December.  But other than that, it's still full steam ahead...

Here's a quick format breakdown for September, as my monthly proof that cable TV still has value, and that streaming isn't taking over the world, not just yet:

16 Movies watched on Cable (saved to DVD): Snatched, I Feel Pretty, Burlesque, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Higher Learning, Fist Fight, Top Five, Creed II, Cheaper By the Dozen, Cheaper By the Dozen 2, The Happytime Murders, The Boss, Central Intelligence, The Rundown, Baywatch, San Andreas,
5 Movies watched on Cable (not saved): The Old Man & The Gun, BlacKkKlansman, Always at the Carlyle, Life of the Party, Skyscraper
3 Watched on Netflix: Our Souls at Night, Triple Frontier, The Clapper
1 watched on iTunes: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
1 watched on Amazon Prime: Paterson
2 watched on Hulu: If Beale Street Could Talk, Sorry to Bother You
1 watched on YouTube: Exit Through the Gift Shop
1 Watched in Theaters: Toy Story 4
30 Total in September

See?  Cable's back, baby, accounting for 21 out of 30 films, that's OVER 2/3 of my line-up.  And I made it through the whole month without cheating by watching an Academy screener (for contrast, I watched 7 of those in April), but I did mess with the timeline by watching "Toy Story 4" back in June and counting it now.  Hey, I didn't know if it would still be available to me in September, so I did what I had to do.

THE PLOT: In the aftermath of a massive earthquake in California, a rescue-chopper pilot makes a dangerous journey across the state with his ex-wife in order to rescue his daughter.

AFTER: Oh, I don't even know where to START with this one - it's disaster porn of the highest level.  A few years ago I spotted the trend in modern cinema of putting all of our high-tech cinematic effects into the area of collapsing buildings - as in "Man of Steel" and "Batman v. Superman", "Skyscraper" is another obvious one, but this has been ALL over movies for a while now.  It's like collectively we're working out some leftover 9/11 guilt issues and we think that depicting this quite graphically in movies is going to lead to some kind of catharsis or something.  If we, as a species, would only channel like HALF the same effort we put into making these destruction special effects look good into something more positive, like fighting climate change or getting the plastic out of the oceans, just think what we could accomplish.  And what would we lose?  Just a few more films that show us cities being destroyed, and do we really need to see that, in the long run?

Now, you may fall on the side of, "But we NEED to see this sort of thing on film, because that's better than seeing it in real life, or it will prepare us for the coming weather-pocalypse."  OK, fine, but if that's where you come down on the issue I think you need to take a hard look at your priorities.  And speaking of priorities, most of the issues I have with this film deal with priorities.  The lead character (played by The Rock, of course) is a pilot of rescue helicopters - which is very convenient considering that those skills he has are going to come in VERY handy later in the film.  He's more than just a pilot, he's a trained rescuer, he rescues people.  Remember that, because that's also going to come in handy later in the film.  However, once the earthquake hits, he ONLY uses those skills to rescue his daughter, who's in the middle of it all going down in San Francisco.  First he has to get from L.A. (coming back from the Hoover Dam) up to San Francisco, along with his ex-wife, and together they have to locate their daughter in the midst of all the madness, and make sure that she's safe.

I'm not a parent, I'll probably never know what it means to care about a child, and to worry about them when they're in danger.  But I can imagine what that's like - however, I question whether a parent should be concerned about their child, and only their child, and want to find them and rescue them to the level of where it's a detriment to every other person in the city.  Let me stress this again, this lead character has been trained to help other people, even by risking his own life (not an ideal situation, but certainly a possibility) to save another's.  Yet for the majority of the film, he blatantly does NOT help all the people he encounters, because somehow his daughter's life is more important.  This, despite the fact that she's been in contact with him by phone, and (at the time of the call, at least), she's out of immediate danger and in a relatively safe spot.  But NOPE, he insists that she leave the safety of the abandoned electronics store and head for the incredibly at-risk location of Coit Tower.

Her parents are on the way to save her (even though she's in no immediate danger) and to do that, they've got to ignore the well-being of everyone else they encounter.  Remember that saying that the problems of two people don't amount to a hill of beans in this world?  This character, who's trained to HELP OTHERS, and do no harm, flies over a collapsing freeway, and DOESN'T even call it in.  For shame!

Later on, he and his ex-wife end up doing a tandem sky-dive out of a plane, just because he can't land it at the airport.  Now, he claims that the plane will fall harmlessly into the sea, once it runs out of gas, but how the hell does he know that?  What if he's wrong, and the plane crashes and kills someone on the ground?  Or if it does crash into the sea, how does he know that it's not going to crash into a small boat and kill everyone on board?  What about the fish in the ocean, who don't deserve to have a plane blow them up?  This is just stupid on top of stupid at this point.

It might not be so bad, except that every so often, Dad says something like, "She's a smart girl, she knows what to do..."  Umm, OK, so why the rush to get to San Fran and rescue her?  Why not help out some of the people you meet along the way?  Look, there goes another building crashing down, there could be a thousand people buried underneath that rubble.  Oh, well, those people weren't smart enough to be born into a family headed up by a helicopter pilot, so screw them, I guess.  Look, I don't expect one man to stop an earthquake, or a tidal wave, or prevent 1,000 deaths in the city of San Francisco, but I at least expect him to TRY to save more people, and not just his own daughter.  His actions are questionable at best, even borderline criminal, to NOT help other people that he sees are in need.  Just sayin'.

The other story concerns a seismologist who's testing a theory for predicting earthquakes, something to do with magnetic pulses or similar mumbo-jumbo, and they go out to the Hoover Dam, a place where there have been a lot of these pulses.  OK, umm, theory confirmed, I guess.  But he isn't able to get this information out to the public in time to actually HELP anyone, either.  Or does he?  That isn't very well explained, like after the first giant quake hits San Francisco, he manages to get some students to help him to hack the broadcast networks, and they get a message out for everyone to evacuate the city.  Ya think?  The people who really needed to see this message, however, were probably already without power.  So it would have been nice to see some indication on screen that his message saved lives, just a little narrative tip.  But the film just couldn't be bothered to do that, because it had to show us more buildings collapsing, very important.

Well, my wife did warn me about this movie, and I didn't listen to that helpful advice, so I guess I got what I deserved.  There are at least a dozen other technical mistakes made here concerning earthquakes and tsunamis (for example, an earthquake in one location could cause a tsunami headed AWAY from it, but this earthquake somehow creates a tsunami that heads TOWARD the earthquake location, which is impossible) but I didn't think of them, I had to look them up on IMDB.  So I don't get credit for noticing these mistakes, but they still exist, and that's a big problem.

Also starring Carla Gugino (last seen in "Gerald's Game"), Alexandra Daddario (also carrying over from "Baywatch"), Hugo Johnstone-Burt, Art Parkinson (last heard in "Kubo and the Two Strings"), Ioan Gruffudd (last seen in "King Arthur"), Paul Giamatti (last heard in "The Little Prince"), Archie Panjabi (last seen in "A Good Year"), Will Yun Lee (last seen in "Spy"), Alec Utgoff (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation"), Marissa Neitling, Kylie Minogue (last seen in "Moulin Rouge!"), Todd Williams, Matt Gerald (last seen in "Bright"), Colton Haynes (last seen in "Rough Night"), Morgan Griffin, Arabella Morton, and archive footage of Chris Cuomo (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone").

RATING: 3 out of 10 looted flatscreen TVs

Baywatch

Year 11, Day 272 - 9/29/19 - Movie #3,370

BEFORE: I would have preferred to watch a film like this during beach season, but I just couldn't break up the set.  Dwayne Johnson carries over again from "Skyscraper", and I'm halfway through his 8-film chain today.

THE PLOT: Devoted lifeguard Mitch Buchannon butts heads with a brash new recruit as they uncover a criminal plot that threatens the future of the bay.

AFTER: Look, I'm all for recycling, but rebooting a classic TV show into a movie rarely works - remember the movie versions of "The Dukes of Hazzard", "Get Smart", "CHiPs", "Dragnet" and "Get Smart"?  OK, once in a while it works, like with "Mission: Impossible" or "Miami Vice", but for every one of those, there are five more that turn out like "Bewitched" or "Wild Wild West".  I think to stand out a movie re-boot of a show has to really up the ante, like "The Untouchables", or go totally into parody-mode, like "Dragnet".  This one attempted to do both, thus producing a convoluted mess that couldn't seem to decide which it wanted to be.

Casting "The Rock" was a great idea, because he ended up sharing something with Hasselhoff's TV version of Mitch Buchannon, both actors have this sort of "aw, shucks" over-sincerity that allows them to seem on the level even when the dialogue is super-corny.  Like, you can't believe that a straight-arrow character could act any straighter than them.  It's like a super-strong sense of self or something, even though people have been making jokes about Hasselhoff for years, he just took it all in stride, probably because he was laughing all the way to the bank, while playing super-corny and simplistic characters like Mitch or Michael Knight.

For contrast, they threw in Zac Efron (hey, another short guy to make Dwayne Johnson look bigger, though he does have a lot of muscles himself) to play a take on a Ryan Lochte swimmer - someone who won some Olympic medals, but got in trouble for partying, failed his team and now has to do some form of community service, so he figured why not be a lifeguard?  The main problem is, he's not a team player, and the Baywatch crew is all about working together as a unit and having each other's backs.  So he butts heads with Mitch Buchannon at first, and it takes a long time to break him into someone who can properly be mentored.

What's weird is that Mitch's old mentor shows up, and that character is played by Hasselhoff, aka the old Mitch Buchannon, which we all know, but the Hoff's character isn't given a name here, because that would be too confusing - like, who's the REAL Mitch, and how can there be two?  OK, I guess that makes sense, because you want to pay tribute to the old show while still moving the movie franchise forward.  But then Pamela Anderson shows up at the end, and she plays a version of her old character, "Casey Jean Parker".  However, they cast a new actress as "CJ Parker", so how can this be?  You can't have two characters with the same name like this, it's not "Into the Baywatch-verse" where there are 5 different Peter Parkers (and a Peter Porker) from all-different realities working together!

I suppose it's another example of how this film doesn't even try to take itself seriously, not at all.  There's a new designer drug going around on the beach, there's some kind of real-estate takeover happening, and city council members are turning up dead, one by one.  By all means, send in the lifeguards, even though they're not police or DEA agents or trained to deal with political corruption in any way.  The movie points this out, again and again, for comic effect, but that doesn't negate the fact that the Baywatch team is completely out of their jurisdiction, most of the time.  I never watched the TV show, but I'm guessing that it slowly devolved from a beach rescue show into something closer to a crime procedural, am I right?

But even I knew that the TV show "Baywatch" was set in California (and in Hawaii in the later seasons, it turns out) so why set the movie in Florida?  Does that help with the double role thing, like is Hasselhoff the Californian Mitch Buchannon, and Dwayne Johnson runs the Florida franchise?   This setting just made me realize the similarities to "Reno 911!: Miami", which also had corrupt council members and drug dealers, and also had Dwayne Johnson in a cameo role.  (Ah, may be it's not just me - Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant from "Reno 911" were two of this film's screenwriters...)

Wow, two contenders for the Golden Raspberry Worst Movie award in one week - but different years, this one was nominated in 2017 and "The Happytime Murders" was a contender in 2017. (Other nominees for this "honor" I've watched this year include "Robin Hood", "Swept Away" and "Movie 43", and I've still got "Holmes & Watson" to go...)

Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "The Paperboy"), Priyanka Chopra (last heard in "Planes"), Alexandra Daddario (last seen in "The House"), Rob Huebel (ditto), Jon Bass (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Hannibal Buress (last seen in "Tag"), Kelly Rohrbach, Ilfenesh Hadera, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (last seen in "Aquaman"), Oscar Nunez (last seen in "Mascots"), Amin Joseph, Jack Kesy (last seen in "12 Strong"), with cameos from David Hasselhoff (last seen in "The Last Laugh"), Pamela Anderson (last seen in "Superhero Movie"), Samantha Harris.

RATING: 4 out of 10 slow-motion shots